That does
not sleepwhich can eternal lie,yet Howard,
Old Gent, Ech-Pei-El,
Lovecraft who signed himself
Grandpa and Theobaldus
to his fans and correspondents
most assuredly sleeps here.

We drift into
the vale of earth,
the gentle falls and slopes
of Swan Point Cemetery,
gather to remember and praise him
as the Seekonk with its silted memories
ribbons at the edge of vision.

The sculpted
monuments
of angels and Psyches
repeat the largesse
of immortal promises 
not so for his simple stone
placed forty years too late
to help his absent-minded shade
come home.

Yews
and cedars
bluff Ides of March
with bitter green, droop branches
like soiled wigs, while honest
bare branches of a spreading beech
retell the long years chase of sun,
the repeated losses of winter.

Which is the
emblem of Lovecrafts sleep?
His life lays stripped
as that sorrowed beech
where his initials are carved
(real or spurious?)

his nightmares
the evergreens,
lingering through seasons,
harboring nightwing
as readily as lark.

2

We stand about,
a handful
swelling to nearly a hundred,
trying to envision his folded hands,
his hand-me-down Victorian suit,
wonder how much of his habiliments
have fed the indiscriminate hunger
of the conquering worm,
his eye sockets empty and dry

gone
beyond dreaming
though we close ours
and see the tower
of ageless Kadath,
the shark-infested ruins of Ponape,
the imaginal Providence
where he walked arm-in-arm
with Poe and his eccentric Helen.

Our Lovecraft,
lord
of the midnight shudder,
eaten from within
by the gnawing shoggoth of poverty,
the Azathoth of squamous cancer,
the loneliness of Nyarlathotep,
drugged by nurses into the sleep
where dreaded night gaunts fly
and bent flutes warble
a twisted melody

and yet he faced
it stoically
like a proud Roman,
an 18th century gentleman.

Death came with
burning eye
and found him not trembling,
never recanting his cosmic vision,
waving away the white-collared cleric
with a wan smile.

3

Hundreds of
miles we came today
to pause and pay homage,
readers and scholars who have leafed
his books, studied his papers,
debated his sources and meanings,
tread in his footsteps in Gotham
and Boston and Federal Hill,
stood with a thrill
at his one-time door.

In sorry, mean-spirited Providence
no plaque or marker reminds us of him.
His grandfathers estate an apartment house,
his mothers house vanished,
his last abode uprooted and moved
like an aimless chessman on street map,
as though the upright town
with its sky-piercing steeples,
mind-numbing priests,
would like to erase him.

A baby in mothers
arms
intrudes on our reminiscing,
breaks Carl Johnsons eulogy
with gurgles and cries of
Rlyeh! Wah! Rlyeh!
(shunned name of the city of doom
where multi-tentacled Cthulhu
dictates his madhouse symphonies!)

As someone reads
a Lovecraft sonnet
the sun blinks off
behind a humped shoulder
of cloud,

and the air
turns cold, unnaturally
cold in a spell
of seconds.
Earth reels beneath our feet
into the chasm of sunless
space.

4

Ah! this is the moons business, or the work
of a moonless night.
Should we not speak of him
beneath the glimmer of Hyades,
the velvet pall of the void,
the primal ether in which the cosmos
whirls like a raft into maelstrom,

the vast interior
spaces
of Time and the Angles
where the gods as he knew them
drool and chant?

But they will
not permit us
to assemble by night.
They seal the gates
against our ghoulish
intrusions,
pretend that the coffined dead
cannot be heard
to turn in their neglected
crypts, deny

that lingering
essences
drawn from the memories
of the living can take
an evanescent life 
pale shadows of shadows,
reflected gleams
from the dusty pane
of a mausoleum,
glints from polished granite
or marble,
a sliver of sourceless light
in the eye of an owl
or a raven;

pretend we are
not
untuned yet powerful
receivers of thought,
transformers of vision,

as if we did
not know
how night
vibrates with poetry,
eidolons plucked
from the minds of the dead.

Reporters and
camera crews
take us in warily,
eye us for vampire teeth,
chainsaws, machetes,
jewelry and witches teats,
wonder what crimes we lust
beneath disguises
to perpetrate
upon their babies,
their wives,
their altars.

We smile,
keeping our secret of secrets,
how we are the gentle ones,
how terror
is our tightrope over life,
how we alone
can comprehend
the smile behind the skull.

5

Later a golden
moon lifts up,
swollen with age and memories,
passing the veined tree skyline,
leaving its double in Seekonk,
disc face scanning the city 
the antfarm of students on Thayer,
the tumult of traffic on Main,
the aimless stroll of dreamers,
dim lamps of insomniacs,
the empty, quiet graveyard
winking like a fellow consiprator
at the prince of night.

Dimly on obelisk
a third moon rises.
The offered flowers
against the headstone
quiver and part.

comes to the
grave,
hands shaking
frightened,
exultant,
hitch-hiked all day

waiting,
mouthing the words
of Necronomicon, for a sign
that does not come

the clear night,
the giant moon
throbbing
as he chants:

That is not
deadwhich can eternal lie,And with strange eonseven Death may die.

L O W T
I D E

"The tide was flowing out horribly--exposing parts of
the riverbed never before exposed to human sight...something
descended to earth in a cloud of smoke, striking the Providence
shore near Red Bridge...The watchers on the banks screamed in
horror--`It has come-It has come at last!' and fled away into
the deserted streets."-H.P. Lovecraft, letter dated May
21, 1920

"brisk off-shore winds pushed a lower than normal `moon
tide' even lower on Narragansett Bay...miring dozens of pleasure
boats in a sea of mud...There are mechanics who say that in the
20 years they've been working here, they've never seen anything
like it."--Providence Journal, September 18, 1986

The azure sea,
the silt brown Seekonk,
the placid ebbing of suntides,
the contrary pull of the moon,
all form a subtle balancing act 
until accumulated rhythms
resolve in one great tug
at the sleeve of the world.

The sea withdraws,
the shape
of the earth convulsed by gravity
as if the sentient waters
grown weary of poison and oil slicks,
bereft of the colloquy of whales,
shrugged into space.

Would not the
war-hemmed
Mediterranean be more serene
refreshing the cracked canals of Mars?
Would not the North Atlantic,
brimful of nuclear submarines,
prefer to slip off the earth-edge weightless,
an unmissed flotilla of icebergs
writing their names in the velvet sky
as comet messengers of Chaos?

The Narragansett
waters drop
as the ocean makes its getaway,
rivers run dry
to fill the falling shoreline.

Drawn from their
sleep by the burning moon,
the people, a motley of coats and robes
and slippers, a clot of bicycles and skates,
drift down to the riverbank
to see the helplessly stranded boats
dangle from their moorings,
level with their anchors,
topsy-turvy on a forest of pilings,
sails drooping and torn,
their rotors exposed like genitals,
their captains perplexed and swearing.

The riverbed
undulates with dying fish,
the wriggling of eels in the hardening mud,
the half-seen slurry of amphibians.
Around the base of the iron-red bridge,
the barrows of humanity emerge:

a tangle of
cars and mattress springs,
the skeletons of suppressed babies,
a statue of the Holy Infant of Prague,
a well-preserved gangster in a steel drum,
a thousand soda bottles & aluminum cans,
and, standing up like autumn trees
or some hideous joke of the fishes
the unfurled frames of lost umbrellas.

Someone says
the water will return, Low tide
out, high tide in,
insists the river
and the bay and the sea
will repave themselves with reflected sky.
Then why should a fireball plummet down
into the sodden riverbed? They watch,
hoarding their fears in the windless midnight,
as steam subsides over the mud-lined crater.

A madman, barefoot,
bearded, rag-robed
avers that the Kraaken is rising
from the noisome mud on the bottom
He snatches a fishermans lantern
and runs across the Red Bridge screaming
It
has come! It has come at last!

The people hear
a distant murmur. A child
goes rigid with the spasm of seizure.
A woman faints, and no one leans
to pick her up. It is a blur
of stumbling and clawing: a boy
is struck down cold for his bicycle,
a deaf girl trampled near a street light.
Men break the door of the great-domed church,
determined to pray out the end of the world,
encircled by Host and holy books.

Of course, it
is only the tide returning,
the meteor a slap from the brittle stars.
Homesick and dizzy from errant flight,
the prodigal sea comes home.
The boats resume their proper angles.
The bay fills in, the river rises.
The elders of Angell Street will say None
of this ever happened.

No 10: THE SWAN POINT GHOUL

Two months have
passed
since I stood here,
in magic circle at the Old Gents
grave, honoring Lovecraft.

The place I
chose to stand on 
an older plot by a pine tree 
has dropped by a foot or more,
its earth a moil of root-turn,
brown against green
of surrounding sod.

Did the coffin
collapse,
or was it removed by
something
that tunnels
beneath the gravebeds? 

some necrophagic
mole-man,
sharp claws on spatulate fingers,
red eyes sheathed in reptile layerings,
teeth jagged and piercing,
its sense of smell infallible,
burrowing from vault to tomb,
to late night lap of pond water,
to daylong sleep in a bat cave.

Even as we stood
here,
speaking our
words of praise,
reading our innocent
poems,
did March earth muffle
the splinter
of casket
the tear of cloth,
the insistent feeding of the Swan
Point ghoul?

H E A R I N G T
H E W E N D I G O

There is a place
where the winds meet howling
cold nights in frozen forest
snapping the tree trunks
in haste for their reunion.

Gone is the summer they brooded in,
gone their autumn awakening.
Now at last they slide off glaciers,
sail the spreading ice floes,
hitch a ride with winter.

Great bears retreat and slumber,
owls flee
and whippoorwills
shudder.
Whole herds of caribou
stampede on the tundra.
The Indian nods and averts his eyes.

Hibernal horror
with a taste for blood!
What need of gods incense and litanies
When every twist of pen compels the mud
To yield up dark, bat-winged epiphanies?

Fear not. Walk
on among them unafraid.
Soul-snatching monsters are as dead as stone.
Hells a blank corridor, its lord a shade. TERROR you
did not fear to tread alone

Shall buoy you
up, with WONDER
at its side. Lovecraft
you called the kindest man you knew,
Refused a priest the day before he died,
Said he preferred a sky where Night Gaunts flew.

That is not
dead which leaps to poets eye,
Where neither friends, nor gods, nor monsters die!

November
8, 1989

T
H E T R E E
A T L O V E C R A F T  S G R A V
E

This solemn
spreading beech
was once a perfect hemisphere
of waxy red-green foliage.
Now it is crippled and sere,
scarred by the pruning
of diseased limbs,
trunk bared, a twisted bole
in the form of a petrified heart.
Its gnarled roots rake earth
with a death-row desperation.

Within another
hollowed bole,
(eye-socket for a Cyclops)
malignant mushrooms proliferate,
caps and stalks angled sunward.

The schoolboy
gashes
where fans have carved initials
(their own and HPLs)
widen and blacken,
the once-proud limbs
tattooed with NECRONOMICON,
HOWARD P. LOVECRAFT 99,
even a whole sentence
about
the primacy of fear,
runes ruinous to a living monument.

Still, the furry
beech-nuts fall like hail
to the delight of squirrels.
Still, the hard brown kernels issue forth,
each a perfect blueprint
of a perfect tree 

or have the
roots, tasting the calcium
of authors bones, the humus rot
of eye and brain and memory
mutated the germ and flower anew
so that these seeds transcend
to sentience?

Gather these
nuts, then,
and harvest them.
First they must hibernate
for the beech remembers glaciers.

Then they will
germinate,
pale tentacles in search
of anchorage,
until the red-green engine
of stalk and leaf
is ready to catapult
into the sun-chase.

Will these trees
move
of their own accord?
Will their root-claws crave blood
and the iron-rich earth
of a crumbling grave?

Will the branches
sway
on windless nights?
Will fox-fires and will o wisps
paint impossible colors
on bud-ends and blossoms?

And will they
speak
the patient sonnets
of their greater lifespans,
the long-arced lines
their waving branches beat?

And somewhere
within them,
does he smile there,
transmuted poet and dreamer
subsumed into the eons?

Are those his
thoughts
that make them tremble
at every sunset, his elder gods they fear
might swallow the sun
as it tosses in darkness?

Is he lord of
their nightmares,
giving them Dread,
the obverse of the coin of Joy,
Fear, the companion of Wonder?

I regard the
ailing tree,
the modest gravestone.
The tree will die. The rain
will wipe the letters clean.
Only the whispered words,
the lines the fingers trace
from one yellowed book
to another
endure 

I hold the burst nuts in one hand,
a book of Lovecrafts tales
in the other.
I study the cloudless, blue, deceptive sky,
the lie that conceals an infinity
of screaming stars 